Spin Cycle is Escape Collective’s news digest, published every Monday and Friday. You can read it on the website (obviously) or click here to have it delivered straight to your inbox.
Hello!
Welcome back to Spin Cycle.
A lot of people are just trying to get through the day making life a little bit easier for themselves.
For instance, we've (wrongly) ignored the mountain bike events from the TV Guide in recent weeks, until we incurred the wrath of those who willingly choose to hurl themselves down bumpy paths.
Meanwhile, Jonas Vingegaard can't be bothered to remember the Critérium du Dauphiné is now called the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes and so asked journalists to just amend his quote to pretend he used the correct name.
And Demi Vollering is trying to drive LinkedIn engagement by fully outsourcing her musings on Thymen Arensman to a large language model. Now there's a sentence that made me do a little sick in my mouth.
But today we start by returning to one of our favourite-ever stories to have graced these grubby pages.
The return of Oklahoma's most infamous Mexican restaurant parking lot 🌯
Former pros and gravel bros are amongst those flying into the USA ahead of the weekend's Unbound.
This includes former WorldTour rider Thomas Dekker, who was briefly detained in Chicago ahead of his transfer to Kansas City.
This stems from the incident two years ago when Dekker and his pal Laurens ten Dam were arrested in the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant in Oklahoma (that sentence still fills me with so much joy) as the pair got changed out of their cycling gear in between parked cars and someone reported them for public indecency. They were jailed for 10 hours before posting bail and making it to the Unbound start line just in time, with these mugshots as souvenirs.
But anyway, back to their planned return to Emporia.
"He was in trouble," Ten Dam recounted on his Live Slow Ride Fast podcast, speaking of his compatriot Dekker. "I had a missed call from him, but by then I was already asleep in my tent. When I woke up in the morning, I saw that I had received a bunch of text messages from him. 'Lautje, I’ve been stuck for over an hour and now I’m missing my flight. What did they ask you last time?'"
Turns out the system had flagged Dekker's criminal record.
"We were standing there naked in Oklahoma, of course. Apparently, a note was made somewhere saying: These are two sex offenders," Ten Dam managed to laugh. "When I flew into America for the first time after that with Tess and the kids, I was taken away too. Back then, they said: Bring your children along, then they’ll be a bit more accommodating. Thomas, of course, didn’t have that."
Luckily, Dekker was released after a quick Google search cleared his name, with regards to the Oklahoma incident, that is. Good luck to the pair this weekend!
Demi Vollering goes full LinkedIn 🤖
I have a not-so-crazy theory that everyone posting on LinkedIn doesn't have enough actual work to do, which makes it even more confusing that 99% of the people posting on there are now outsourcing that task to AI.
But we really didn't expect Demi Vollering to have joined that club. How does she find the time? It seems she's been doing it for a while, too.
Did we do a good job with this story?
